Two-Player Sealed vs Minotaur Horde and Xenagos Revel (WUBRG Sealed)

A friend and I got together on Tuesday afternoon to try our hand against two Theros-block horde decks and test out my web implementations of them.  (I did find some errors I haven't fixed yet, so I won't link to those quite yet.) 

We decided to open more recent packs, so we each cracked three packs of Murders at Karlov Manor and Outlaws of Thunder Junction.  Here's what I opened:

I shouldn't have left the lands in front.  I don't know why I did that.

I built this deck from those cards.  I kept the curve really low because my experience is that you either lost in the first few turns or survive long enough to mount a comeback.  Let me know what I could have done better!

There was enough fixing that I was okay, even with only three multi-lands.

We played five games.  I didn't take many notes about what was going on during those games, mostly because unlike normal games of magic, I didn't really have any "down time" where I wasn't actively talking with my teammate.

We played two games against the Battle the (Minotaur) Horde deck.   In the first game, we let the Horde deck play three cards per turn instead of the normal two.  (The instructions say to modify the number of free turns the players get to adjust the difficulty, but I wanted to tinker with this instead.)  We were able to win easily on turn 9 or 10.  In the second game, we bumped that up to four and still won around turn 8, again without problem.  Maybe the right thing to do is to change the number of turns the players get.  

At this point, we switched to the Xenagos deck.  I had just played against the physical cards on Friday, and immediately the rules we had come up with came into question, namely:

• Players share a 20-point life total, and
• If a creature is blocked by one player, it is blocked for all players.

The reason we came to the shared life total is due to this old MTGSalvation thread that seems to be the best thing to a ruling I found online.  It describes a situation where the player team has two players and is dealt eight damage by Xenagos's Strike instead of just 4.  

This format is extremely hard.  I had been trying on my own the day before and couldn't beat the deck even when it started with only one reveler on the board.  On Friday we had some really good decks, but we were only able to beat it in twice in five tries.  The good news is that the games can go really quickly when you're losing.  

For the two of us on this day, we first tried against two revelers.  We lost on turn two.  We tried again with only one reveler and died on turn five.  Oof.  We had no real chance in either of those games.

We modified the rules to give ourselves a fighting chance:

• We had separate life totals, but
• We still said that when a creature was blocked it damaged none of the players.  Unblocked creatures hit all players, just like in Cutthroat blocking.  

We started with just one reveler on the board with Xenagos.  This time we managed to survive through the most dangerous turns and then stabilize our life total.  We won around our turn ten, but it was still tough.

I'm really torn about how I want to play against this deck.

• On the one hand, sharing a life total seems to be the way it's meant to play, as the MTGSalvation thread quotes from the old Daily MTG article.  Unfortunately, it just does not scale.  If there are four players, Xenagos can easily kill the table on the first turn.  And even at one player, the format is extremely difficult.  
• On the other hand, with separate life totals and cutthroat blocking, we won, but the game did turn into a bit of a slog.  

I'm going to have to test more.  I wonder whether there's another (smaller) change that can make the multiplayer game work better.

However you decide to fight Xenagos, Happy Magicking!